Surface Detail

same jolly side.

“Oh! And I nearly forgot; an NR ship is causing havoc on/in/all over Vebezua! Yes! Another ship, possibly a Culture ship, possibly another Culture warship, was last heard of high-tailing it out of the Vebezua system, possibly having delivered some-thing or somebody, and possibly now departing there with the intention of joining in all the fun out here at the Disk and depleting our once-fine fleet of ships even quicker. And the NR themselves are making deeply suspicious noises, bordering on outright hostile noises, when it comes both to ourselves and you, Veppers, and are only not helping to destroy our short-lived war fleet because they want to see how fast and how ably the Culture vessel-fleet does so; valuable intelligence, we are given to understand. Though of course the presence and presumed hostility of the NR does mean that any of our ships that might escape from the vicinity of the Disk itself may well find themselves being picked off by the NR.

“There. That is the fucking situation. I face shame, humiliation, demotion, court martial and ruin, and — oh, please do believe me, dear Mr. Veppers — if such a fate befalls me I shall do everything I possibly can to make sure that you fall with me, cherished ally and co-conspirator.”

Bettlescroy took a deep breath, drew itself up and, collecting itself, it seemed, made a calm, expansive motion with its hands. “Now,” it said. “I can’t really imagine how many more of our ships have been laid waste while I have been speaking but I imagine the number comes to some several thousand. Please, Veppers, if we are to salvage anything, anything at all from what is increasingly looking like a calamitous venture and an utterly hopeless situation, tell us where the targets are. At least some of them, at least the nearest ones, given that we will have so few ships, so ill-equipped and so slow-moving, by the time you get round to finally telling us where…” Bettlescroy paused, “… the fucking…” it paused again, taking another deep breath, “… targets…” one last pause, “… are.”

Veppers sighed. “Thank you, Bettlescroy. That was really all I wanted to know.” He smiled. “One moment…” He clicked the sound off at the computer and turned to Jasken. On the screen, Bettlescroy appeared to be shouting, and striking the screen at its end with both hands. Jasken had to tear his gaze away.

“Sir?”

“Jasken, I’m absolutely famished. Would you mind seeing what we have in the kitchen here? Just a bite or two and some decent wine. Even water would do… but do look for some drinkable wine. Get something for yourself, too.” Veppers grinned, nodded at the comms unit, where Bettlescroy appeared to be trying to bite the edge of the screen. “I can manage here.”

“Sir,” Jasken said, and left the room.

Veppers watched the study door close, then turned back to the screen and switched the sound back on.

“… Where?” Bettlescroy shrieked.

“Ready?” Veppers asked calmly.

Bettlescroy sat staring at the screen, eyes wide, breathing hard. What might have been spittle disfigured its finely made chin.

“Good,” Veppers said, smiling. “The most important targets — the only ones really worth bothering with now — are easily reached and close by; they’re under the trackways on my estate of Espersium. In fact, come to think of it, somebody — possibly the NR, as you suggest — has already begun the task of destroying them, when they attacked my flier.

“Anyway, to reiterate: every trackway is underlain by what to the untutored eye looks like some sort of giant fungal structure. It isn’t. It’s substrate. Low-power, bio-based, not ultra-fast running, but high-efficiency, highly damage-resistant substrate; anything from ten to thirty metres thick under and amongst the roots, but adding up to over half a cubic kilometre of processing power spread throughout the estate. All the comms traffic to and from it is channelled through the phased array satellite links dotted round the mansion house itself. The ones that everyone still thinks just control the Virtualities and games.

“That’s what you have to hit, Bettlescroy. The under-trackway substrates contain over seventy per cent of the Hells in the entire galaxy.” He smiled again. “Of those we know of, anyway. Used to be slightly more, but very recently I sub-contracted the NR Hell, just to be on the safe side. I’ve been buying Hells up for over a century, Legislator-Admiral, taking the processing requirements and legal and jurisdictional implications off other peoples’ hands for most of my business life. The majority of the Hells are right here, in system, on planet. That is why I have always felt able to be so relaxed regarding the targeting details. Think you can get enough ships to Sichult to lay waste to my estate?”

“Truly?” Bettlescroy said, gulping, still breathing deeply. “The targets are on your own estates? Why would you do that?”

“Deniability, Bettlescroy. You’ll have to raze the trackways, wreck my lands, blast the satellite links and damage the house itself; maybe even destroy it. That house has been in my family for centuries; it and the estate are inestimably precious to me. Or at least so everybody assumes. Who’s going to believe I brought all that destruction on myself?”

“And yet you… no, wait.” The little alien shook its head. “I have to issue the relevant orders.” The Legislator-Admiral bent over its desk, then looked up again. “That’s all; the trackways of Espersium, centred on the house?”

“Yes,” Veppers said. “Target away.”

Bettlescroy took only seconds to issue the orders. When it came back it was after a blanked-out delay of a few more seconds during which, Veppers suspected, the Legislator-Admiral had composed itself, smoothed down its scalp scales and wiped its face. Bettlescroy certainly seemed much more like its old glossily imperturbable self when it switched back on.

“You would do this to yourself, Veppers? To your family’s legacy?”

“If it keeps me alive to enjoy my spoils, of course. And the spoils promise to be fabulous; another order of magnitude greater than anything I’ll be losing. The house can be rebuilt, the art treasures replaced, the trackways… well, I’d grown tired of them anyway, frankly, but they could be filled in and re-grown, I dare say. The energy weapons leave negligible radioactivity, hyper-velocity kinetics leave even less, as I understand it, and the missile warheads are clean, aren’t they?”

“Thermonuclear, but clean as possible. Designed to destroy, not contaminate,” Bettlescroy agreed.

“There you are then; it’s not as though I go camping in my estates at the best of times, so even if some areas are a bit radioactive I shan’t be too heartbroken. Let’s be honest; the grounds are mostly there to maintain a barrier between me and the proletarian hordes anyway. If the hills and fields do end up glowing in the dark they’ll work even better as insulation against the milling masses. And, in the end, I can just buy another estate; another dozen if I like.”

“And the people?”

“What people?”

“The people on the estate when it is laid waste.”

“Oh. Yes. I assume I have a few hours before any attack takes place.”

“Hmm.” The little alien hesitated, peered at its screen. “… Yes. The quickest attack would come from a small squadron of the ships fitted with fleet-donated anti-matter for their warp engines; if they simply sped on past without attempting to draw to a stop first they could hit the targets within three and a half hours of now. But their on-board weaponry targeting accuracy would not be great at that speed; they would struggle to hit with less than a hundred-metre error-allowance, at best. Missiles and smart warheads would be more precise, though Sichult’s own planetary defences would most likely intercept some of those. More pinpoint accuracy would need to come from ships that had slowed down almost to a stop. Again, your planet’s own defences might exact a toll, though they would probably still arrive in such numbers that this would not matter. Say four to five hours for those to arrive. One might attack the trackways themselves with the first high-speed waves and target the satellite links near the house with the later-arriving vessels.”

“So, bottom line: I’d have time to get a few people out,” Veppers said. “Not too many, of course; it still has to look convincing. But I can always hire more people, Bettlescroy. Never a shortage of those, ever.”

“Still, it is quite a toll you would ask of yourself.”